More Power Needs More Coherence

July 1, 2011

David Bohm on Power and Incoherence:

We cannot grasp the totality but we can have a feeling for the whole. We can have the attitude of not restricting ourselves to parts, but to allowing our consciousness to be based on the whole of whatever we can experience. Turn to the whole of reality as far as we can and go from there to the parts. The parts are seen within the whole rather than begin with the parts and put them together like a machine.

We have to be sensitive to incoherence. Delusion arises when we are not sensitive to incoherence. When we overlook it. If anybody claims to have evidence it is always limited and you can’t trust it either. So there is no guarantee at all. We can’t trust anybody to tell us about these things.

We have a tremendous resistence to acknowledge incoherence. People are constantly saying that ‘everything is alright’, ‘there is nothing to worry about’, ‘this is all very coherent’. So the keypoint is, to attent to incoherence, first acknowledge it and then to do something about it.

Incoherence has become more dangerous because of the scale of our society and because of technology. We have all sorts of dangers which are brought about by our power. The greater power we have, the greater we need coherence.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.